Science briefs: Panel wants particle-beam project

The U.S. should build a billion-dollar project to beam ghostlike subatomic particles 800 miles underground from Chicago to South Dakota, a committee of experts told the federal government Thursday.

That would help scientists learn about these puzzling particles, called neutrinos, which zip right through human beings.

The proposed invisible neutrino beam would be the biggest U.S. particle physics projects in many years, said panel chairman Steven Ritz of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Still, it would be much smaller than Europe's Large Hadron Collider, which found the critical Higgs boson.

The neutrino beam was one of the top big-money projects that the scientific panel suggested in a list of priorities for federal particle physics research.

Other big projects included improvement of the European collider and the creation of a Japanese subatomic particle smasher.

Cultured meat is food of future, professors say

If the notion of biting into a hamburger made from lab-cultured stem cells doesn't make your mouth water, perhaps your brain can find it appetizing.

That's the view of two Dutch professors who argue that meat grown in enormous test tubes, or bioreactors, can provide an ever more prosperous world with a plentiful, environmentally friendly and humane source of protein.

Cultured meat, they say, is the food of the future.

"Rising global demand for meat will result in increased environmental pollution, energy consumption and animal suffering," the Wageningen University professors wrote last week in the journal Trends in Biotechnology.

"As large parts of the world become more prosperous, the global consumption of meat is expected to rise enormously in the coming decades," they wrote.